Chicken-Little Politics and the Curse of Testing (and Standards) in South Carolina
I entered education as a high school teacher in South Carolina in the 1984-1985 academic year, the first year of a significant teacher pay raise and a pivotal ground zero in the state’s accountability era established in late 1970s legislation.
Over about four decades, SC has revised or changed educational standards six or seven times and implemented about the same number of differentstate and national tests.
And what hath this curse of testing and standards wrought for SC?
South Carolina students bomb the ACT, falling behind Mississippi, announces an article by Paul Bowers explaining:
South Carolina’s graduating class of 2018 came close to dead-last in the nation on the ACT college readiness test, painting a grim picture of a state that has languished near the bottom of education rankings for decades.This year’s graduates placed 50th among the states and Washington, D.C., on the ACT, according to composite scores based on the test’s English, Reading, Math and Science sections.Only Nevada’s students did worse.
The chicken-little politics of accountability has been fulfilled in ways that assure politicians, the public, and the media will declare schools, teachers, and students a failure. Yet again, and again, ad nauseam.
Let’s try something different here, ways to interpret better this data from the ACT.
The first key point about these scores is that SC is experiencing Continue reading: Chicken-Little Politics and the Curse of Testing (and Standards) in South Carolina | radical eyes for equity
